Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
Solomon Nunes Carvalho is thought to have made this daguerreotype self-portrait when he was already well trained in the art of photography. A few years after he made this portrait, in 1853 and 1854…
This partially gilt-silver Torah crown from Poland is studded with semi-precious stones. Its two-tiered base is typical of Torah crowns from Eastern Europe. It is inscribed in Hebrew with the words,…
Maurice Ascalon, sometimes called the father of modern Israeli decorative arts, was commissioned to create this sculpture for the façade of the Palestine Pavilion of the 1939 New York World’s Fair…